Hacking is becoming a commonplace issue -- for both personal accounts and big companies. It seems like every day we’re hearing about security breaches that result in stolen information and frustrated users.

LaunchKey is on a mission to solve that problem. Founded at Startup Weekend Las Vegas in July 2012, LaunchKey’s goal is to eliminate passwords. Their free app (currently available for iOS and coming soon to Android) enables secure user authentication on websites, applications, and other computer systems without the need for passwords. Instead, users pair their smartphone or smart device to LaunchKey and external systems implement an API.

LaunchKey is committed to privacy -- they even one-way hash email addresses used when pairing a device, making it inaccessible even to them. It makes sense, then, that when the team sought out a cloud provider, security was a big concern. After using other cloud providers for a few months and getting frustrated with downtime and outages, LaunchKey wanted a better solution.

Devin Egan, co-founder and CTO of LaunchKey, says that they were originally introduced to Joyent by Switch; they’re using the Switch data center in Las Vegas because it’s local, and more importantly, because it’s secure.

“When you’re thinking about choosing a cloud provider, you have to take into account where they’re hosted and what kind of environment they run in,” Devin explained. “Joyent hosts their cloud in top-tier data centers. We were incredibly impressed by the ability to leverage Switch data center solutions as a Joyent customer.”

The biggest impact Joyent has had on our business is the ability to scale at our own pace.
-Devin Egan, LaunchKey co-founder and CTO

LaunchKey ended up building their whole infrastructure on Joyent, including building out more than 20 virtual machines. They also have begun to utilize Chef to manage their Web stack and virtual machines via the Joyent API.

“The biggest impact Joyent has had on our business is the ability to scale at our own pace,” said Devin. “We’ve also had zero outages, which makes us confident in Joyent’s ability to deliver on their incredible promise of 99.999% cloud uptime.”

Yesterday, the team announced that they’re opening up their Private beta to allow outside companies to implement LaunchKey solutions. Head on over to their site to learn more about how you can participate!